We will hope that no amateur did fall, and may join with Beldham in “believing it impossible,” but the fiction that they did was used by the Legs to persuade any man of difficult honesty to go crooked. “Serve them as they serve you,” was the argument, or one of the arguments, used. That “fine old man” whom Mr. Pycroft drew out so freely gives no edifying pictures of the players of the day: “Merry company of cricketers, all the men whose names I had ever heard as foremost in the game, met together, drinking, card-playing, betting, and singing, at the Green Man—that was the great cricketers’ house—in Oxford Street—no man without his wine, I assure you, and such suppers as three guineas a game to lose and five to win—that was then the sum for players—could never pay for long.” That was their rate of payment, and that their mode of life—perhaps not the best fitted for the clear eye and the sound wind. It appears that this degrading condition of cricket was brought to an end by its own excesses; it became a crying scandal. “Two very big rogues at Lord’s fell a-quarrelling.” They charged each other with all sorts of iniquities in the way of selling matches, all of which accusations, when compared with the records, squared so nicely with the truth that they carried conviction, and “opened the gentlemen’s eyes too wide to close again to those practices.” Mr. Pycroft has a note on his own account about the match at Nottingham in which his informant confessed to him that he was paid to lose. There were men on the other side who were paid to lose too, but, perhaps because there were twenty-two of them, they could not do it, but won in their own despite. It must have produced funny cricket, this selling of a match both ways, and Mr. Pycroft picked up a story of a single-wicket match in which both were playing to lose, where it was only by accident that a straight ball ever was bowled, but when it came it was always fatal. It reminds us of the much-discussed wides and no-balls bowled in the ‘Varsity match to avert the follow-on: but, thank heaven, there is no suspicion of fraudulent financial motives in even the queerest of cricketing tactics to-day. It is truly wonderful how all heavy betting has gone out. Partly, no doubt, this is because men play more in clubs. When individuals used to get up matches the players’ expenses came very heavy; therefore they made the matches for a considerable stake to cover them, but the practice cannot have comforted the losers much. Nowadays the club pays players out of the subscribed funds.